In more than just a poetic sense, Gage embodies the Net. He is a universal connection machine - ubiquitous, free, and open. He is "a thousand fingers, stuck into a thousand pies," says James Gosling, one of Sun's Distinguished Engineers and the principal author of Java's code. Gosling tells this story of a Gage encounter: "Back when we were getting HotJava, the browser, ready for release, John turns up one day and starts packing cables and monitors, generally scrounging stuff. So I ask him what he's doing. Says John: 'I'm doing the keynote at the TED conference tomorrow and I need something to show.'

"Once John gets going he's a pretty immovable object. So I realize I had better get in the car with him and go. As we drove down to Monterey, he became less and less coherent. It was like a bunch of kid's blocks, thrown in the air. That's how random the phrases were coming out. The Internet connection at the hotel was a nightmare. The network kept going down. I was up all night fixing it. And then 30 seconds before we're supposed to start, the problems just stopped. And he was brilliant. That's John - 24 hours from throwing random junk into the back of his station wagon to an absolutely flawless performance."

Says McNealy: "John is what I call randomly hardwired. To try to reconfigure him into something more methodical would ultimately wind up destroying the whole thing."

Bill Joy recounts another Gage story - everyone seems to have one. "John and I were flying to Beijing," Joy says, "and he shows up at the airport in San Francisco with his John Gage bags - the biggest carry-ons you've ever seen. Duffel bags, no interior dividers, packed to absolute maximum density. There was engine trouble, the flight took forever, but we sat there and John just kept pulling interesting stuff out of those bags; there must have been a thousand things in there - papers, books, articles. I don't think we ever slept. And this was maybe two of the piles from his house."

Turn on, tune in, assimilate, connect. John Gage is a network, and the network is John Gage.

See ya later, agitator

It's a hot summer weekend, and Gage is in Washington, DC, for the launch of NetDay '96, a nationwide follow-up to the wire-the-schools event held in California in March. Clinton can't make it, but Gore and FCC chair Reed Hundt are on their way over to bestow a White House blessing. In the meantime, Gage - who spent the early morning frantically trying to get all the AV gear up and running - is warming up 300 prospective NetDay organizers from around the country.

In his trademark podium voice - think Vietnam moratorium organizer crossed with Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars - Gage works the crowd. He's smooth, liquid, convincing. "This mechanism, the Net, has never existed before, but it's wonderfully powerful," he says. As proof, he reports that 100,000 people throughout California participated in NetDay. "They can't all be up on ladders, pulling wire," says Gage. "But how about scrubbing the bathrooms? And for the first time, a lot of people actually saw what the schools were like. Now that's an interesting educational experience."

Gage's history notwithstanding - he's still very much a registered Democrat - he's studiously agnostic about partisan efforts to grab the digital high ground. "I went to a meeting in Atlanta," he says, "where Newt Gingrich had assembled some of his people - guys with dollar signs on their ties and all - to discuss the impact of the new technologies. At one point he said: 'The issues that we will use to beat the Democrats in the next election are unfortunately not the issues on which we can build the United States of the 21st century.' At least he's being honest. Most Democrats won't go that far."

NetDay is designed to be an end run around the whole process. And it's pure Gage, equal parts inevitability and vapor - get out the digital megaphone, pull everyone in for a brief burst of activity, then strike the virtual tents and move on. "It's the fundamental principle of organizing," he says. "You're not organizing things - you're giving people the tools to organize
themselves."